Why Hasn't Anyone Gone To Jail For Their Part In Our Financial Crisis?

[jtuck004]

The story at the link is an interview of William Black, a lawyer and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the UMKC School of Law. His work was critical in the jailing of a thousand bankers in the S&L crisis of the 80's and 90's, including Charles Keating, while he was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

You can read the transcript, about how the resources needed for this effort are being withheld, especially the part about where both parties may be influenced by the political donations of these crooks, here.

...In the current crisis, of course they appointed anti-regulators. And this crisis goes back well before 2007 and of course it is continuing, it does not end at 2009. So the FBI warned in open testimony in the House of Representatives, in September 2004—we are now talking seven years ago—that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, their words, and they predicted that it would cause a financial crisis, crisis being their word, if it were not contained...
..
... I am going to quote from the Mortgage Bankers Association. That is the trade association of the perps and this is their Anti-Fraud Specialist Unit, and they reported this to every member of the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2006. So nobody can claim they did not know. They found three critical things, first they said this kind of loan where you do not do underwriting is, and I am quoting again, “an open invitation to fraudsters.” Second, they said “the best study of this found a 90% fraud incident.” In other words, if you look at 100 liars loans, 90 of them are fraudulent. And third they said, therefore these loans where the euphemism is stated income are Alt-A loans, actually deserve the title that the industry calls the Behind Closed Doors, and that is liars loans. The other thing we know from other studies and investigations, is that it was overwhelmingly lenders and their agents that put the ‘lie’ in liars loans....So again, we got thirty, roughly one-third of all the loans by 2006, after these warnings. They rapidly increased the number of liars loans they made. One-third of them are liars loans and 90% of them are fraudulent, which is to say, that the amount of fraud annually was well over a million fraud a year. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent instruments.
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...So yeah, the CEO’s knew all about this. Why did they do it? And the answer is, here is the recipe, it’s got four ingredients for creating what the Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, George Akerlof and his colleague Paul Romer said in 1993 was "a sure thing". And that sure thing is what in criminology we call accounting control fraud...control fraud is when the person who controls a seemingly legitimate entity, uses it as a weapon to fraud. In the financial sphere, the weapon of choice is accounting...
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Every year, with a million plus cases of fraud a year, if you prosecute a thousand of them or two thousand of them or three thousand of them, you are a million cases further behind every year, right. It is just insane...And it is only going to change if we express our outrage as the people and demand that it is changed.

This is why they laugh at us from their offices, and come to the OWS site to do interviews as the proud 1%. They are not a bit scared of ANY of this.

Yet.

But my sign at the occupy site I went to said INVESTIGATE THE FRAUD - JAIL THE PERPS. And it will say the same next time. It ain't particularly clever, and probably won't show in the pictures of the funnier ones, but if we let them get away with this we will never be anything but indentured servants and cowards.